Being a Linux/Ubuntu user, i cannot use the praised Textmate editor to develop ruby applications. I tried a lot of editors, some of them being very good ones, but in the end I always end up using gedit.
gedit is great… but it is rather limited features-wise. Recently I have tried Komodo Edit and I can say that this is the best RubyOnRails editor available on Linux. It has a lot of features (autocomplete, tons of supported languages, macros, color schemes, etc) but somehow it is still light and minimalist.
Komodo Edit is also available on Mac and Windows

I feel so weird. Maybe it’s just the side-effects of eating that old, pinky-brown colored and talking piece of raw meat that was sitting in the corner of my kitchen since a month or two… but as strange as it may sound, I think it’s something else.
I think it is something related to Rails that makes me so excited. I just tried deploying a rails application with Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails)… and I am still shocked. Rails deployment has finally becomes a breeze! At the time I am writing this, I still have this exaggerated dumb smile in my face expressing my satisfaction… and I am alone in my house.
#UPDATE : I removed the smiling pig image that was put here to “express my satisfaction”. I removed it because it was not funny and it made me look like someone who is not funny… which is something I am not comfortable with. Now that I have removed the image of the smiling pig, I expect to receive my first comment (and tons of others) for this blog post. For those who liked the smiling pig, you can find it here and pretend it is funny.
Ok enough stupidities, Phusion Passenger is great. It is built to work with the Apache web server. No port configuration, no complicated vhost configuration, you upload your stuff and guess what? It works. Well, almost… to restart your rails application you just have to touch tmp/restart.txt. If you’re using capistrano, it means that you only have to do something like that :

namespace :deploy do
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
    run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
  end
end

And what about the vhost configuration?

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /home/you/apps/yourapp/current/public
</VirtualHost>

I didn’t have time to play with all the settings and read the documentation… but I have the feeling that this thing is the light, try it!

gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module